http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The Obama Doctrine can be summed up as the assertion that for the United States to have influence and standing on the global stage, it must first abandon its interests and its allies.
The doctrine is rarely described as bluntly as that by its proponents who employ euphemisms like multilateral policies and honest broker to mean much the same thing, denouncing the previous administration and all the preceding administrations going back to old Tom Jefferson for alienating the world by pursuing American interests and cutting deals with non-progressive allies.
The easiest way to spot the problem with this approach is to try and distinguish it from the UN. That’s hard to do because except during the occasional pro-forma trade dispute there is no distinction. It’s the same policy of multilateral human rights interventions, global mediation and stability, and promoting the welfare of the angrier parts of the Third World. And if America’s agenda is identical to that of the United Nations, than for all intents and purposes there is no American foreign policy.
This leaves the United States as less than a nation, a version of the United Nations with its own military and a great deal of wealth. It has no interests except reaching out to befriend its enemies and it has no allies except those enemies willing to pretend to be its allies, at which point they will become enemies. But the United Nations was designed to be a forum in which nations pursue their own interests, it is not supposed to have interests or allies. The United States is a nation and it is meant to have both. If the United States cannot articulate interests apart from the UN agenda then it no longer functions as a nation on the world stage.